My Tango With Barbara Strozzi is quite complicated. It's less a novel than a series of musical, literary and art-historical references that points towards the possibility of a novel. Something like a novel has been imagined here by overlaying one thin sheet of history upon the next. In any case, what holds it together, at least until some late plotting kicks in, is - as usual - Russell Hoban's voice. We are not fooled when the voice claims to be that of Phil Ockerman, a writer whose last book was described by Germaine Greer as "a shallow male fantasy that didn't add up to a novel". We are not fooled for a second when the voice claiming to be Ockerman also claims to be "forty years old". No one could write these kinds of shallow male fantasies so well, or so deftly - no one could admit to them as the psychic defeats they represent - unless they were a good deal older than that.

So: Hoban, pretending to be Phil Ockerman, falls suddenly and inexplicably in love with the 17th-century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi, and decides to get closer to her by learning to dance the Argentinian tango. In Hoban's world, it's the only sensible thing to do, and it leads Phil first to a cellar in Clerkenwell, then into a bleakly on-off relationship with a woman he meets there, Bertha Strunk. Like many of Hoban's recent central characters, Phil is looking for a muse. Bertha's problem is a violent ex-husband. Perhaps they can be of use to one another? The ensuing comic tango centres itself on a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and the plot of Francis Ford Coppola's film The Rainmaker

Who's the exploiter here, and who the exploited? Bertha seems determined, and Phil seems like an idiot. Yet she is soon finding it difficult to abandon him, puzzledly asking herself: "Am I his girlfriend because I feel that he needs me?" You suspect that many of Phil's girlfriends have asked themselves the same question. He doesn't look after himself well. He is obsessed with everyone from Elgar to Sir Thomas Wyatt, as long as they're dead and he can quote from them, and all he ever seems to eat is Domino's pizza. He's boring. Despite that, you soon find yourself entangled. Meanwhile, he's re-entangling himself with an ex-wife and a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, with whom he struck up an instant acquaintance in room 41 of the National Gallery, under a small Daumier which shows Don Quixote charging a flock of sheep.

This is a book of instant acquaintances, in which people who don't know each other have peculiarly direct conversations. Within 10 minutes of meeting they sit down in cafes and begin to exchange deep autobiographical details. A moment later they're looking at their watches and saying, "I must go". The effect is quite difficult to describe. From Turtle Diary on, Hoban has portrayed people who are emotionally ambitious but somehow lacking a bridge between what they want and what they do to get it. They are always ready to engage one another, but they don't plan; they're opportunistic but don't try to maximise their luck. Ockerman seems like the final product of this view: he doesn't maintain quite enough contact with what happens to him, or even what happens inside him, to be a character in a novel. He wanders from Clerkenwell to Fulham, Fulham to Waterloo, gazing out of trains, eating sandwiches and taking heart from single words on advertisement hoardings (FOUND is a favourite), his progress not much more than picaresque. Hoban takes advantage of this to continue his obsessive mapping of London, or his mapping on to London of everything else in the universe.

The other kind of mapping going on here is cultural. My Tango With Barbara Strozzi begins with a joke about Pandora's box, and moves on from there at an average of about one reference per page (though sometimes it's more than that, and sometimes they take up half a page or so), for a steady 164 pages. Before you start reading, some preparation is a good idea. If you don't already know of them, or their work, you might want to do an internet search for Barbara Strozzi and Artemisia Gentileschi; refamiliarise yourself with Johnny Cash, Francesco Guardi's brown ink sketches, the story of Judith and Holofernes, and the layout of the National Gallery; and, of course, watch The Rainmaker again. You might want to have a quick leaf through the novels of Russell Hoban, too. Finally, to be on the safe side, take a course in the tango (Hoban can recommend a good DVD). Otherwise you could spend two pages out of four not knowing what the central character is talking about.

The air of London, Ockerman observes, is "full of all kinds of signals", of ghostly voices and laughter. People die, "but some essence of them remains to travel where it will, unfettered by limitations of time and space." The reverse seems to be happening in Hoban's fiction. Over the past few years his characters have become less than ghosts. Scenes fade even as they repeat, absorbed into the walls, trapped by the graffiti written on trains, sucked back in like old breath by the cultural references, fixed or transient, from which they were derived. My Tango With Barbara Strozzi is a haunting: exasperating, funny, sad and elegiac. Catch it before it disappears.